[nemothekid]

Its odd to imply that Apple iOS has a worse developer experience than Google. IMO, MS is far and away the best but if I had the choice of targeting Apple's 5 devices vs Android 1000, I'd choose Apple. I have not heard spectacular things about Android development, especially with regards to fragmentation that would lead me to believe that from a developer POV Google is better than Apple. Granted that this is only for mobile.

Doubling down on mobile, say what you want about the walled garden, but it seems in "developer" experience Apple also wins when you consider the size of their developer eco systems. The App Store simply makes more money and it still seems that the iPhone still gets preferential treatment.

In the end open vs. closed or single OEM vs multi OEM doesn't seem to matter.

[mahyarm]

In my experience, the java code is more concise to read and easier to deal with. At work the android client is less 'visually ambitious' than our iphone client, but tends to actually have less bugs and faster development times. Android has put some thought into multi-sized layouts and had the right idea how to do ui layout files from the start with their xml layout files. Android accepts the reality that multiple versions exist and allow you to backport new libraries into old versions. iOS not so much and we feel the pain in our development times and bugs.

Apple did their GUI foundation right with CoreAnimation, touch recognition and choosing c++ & objective-c as the foundation of their mobile OS. Android didn't do it right with java, a garbage collected language and their UI rendering fundamentals, and everything suffers the consequences of that today.